Kabhi Smart Kabhi Stupid
Anyone who knows me at all knows that I manage to make my way through multiple books in a month. Some books I read because I want to get lost in a story and read about characters that feel real; others I read because I need to escape reality, even if it is only for the time that it takes me to finish a 400-page book. There’s a small group of books I read with the sole purpose of feeling stupid, and that’s what I want to talk about.
Just this week, I finished a book called ‘This Is How You Lose The Time War’ by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, a 2020 release about two women, introduced to us as Red and Blue, who are on opposite sides of a war and fall in love with each other over time and space. Stay with me! The book is written in an epistolary format (in the form of letters), which I generally enjoy, and the letters that the two women (I use that term loosely because they are technically not humans(?). Or at least that is what I understood. I did read the book!) are interspersed with short choppy chapters describing their hit-and-miss meetings in different times and different versions of time.
From my shoddy description of the book’s plot, it is easy to gather that there were several things about it that went completely over my head. Maybe the book wasn’t for me, or maybe it is just that I am too stupid to understand all the things that the authors were trying to say. But did I have fun while reading it? Absolutely!
If there’s one thing that I love about reading out of my comfort zone, which resides in the genres of literary fiction, magical realism, contemporary fiction and the occasional forays into fantasy, it is coming face-to-face with all the things that I do not know. The words used, and the scenarios explained make me feel like the author is gifted with more ‘smart genes’ than I will ever have, and I actively seek out books that make me feel that way. I mean, I don’t know about you, but at least when I am reading anything by Salman Rushdie or Shashi Tharoor, there are five times per page minimum when I stop and question my own intelligence. But I did finish Midnight’s Children. It took me longer to read than all the books on the longlist for last year’s Women’s Prize put together, and to date, I can’t say I understood everything, but that is beside the point.
The point is that if we continue to read within our selected genres that make us feel safe and smart, we will never be able to expand our horizons. And what is the point of reading if you are not forcing your last brain cells to scratch their heads? Being a person who cannot bring herself to study things from boring textbooks, fiction, and creative nonfiction are my saviours. I am currently coming to terms with all the gaps in my knowledge of world history as I make my way through ‘The Silk Roads’ by Peter Frankopan. If you are one of those who read Rushdie with ease, don’t laugh at me. Here’s a reality check: there is always someone in this world who is smarter than you, even if that someone is not Salman Rushdie.
